He didn’t fill the silence, which I noticed, because most people did. Most people met the quiet of me with chatter to cover their nerves. But not Wes. He just floated and let the cove be quiet. Every so often, he said something that wasn’t about anything. Heremarked on the water’s perfect temperature or a fish he’d seen or the way the rock changed color where the water hit it. I found myself answering and then saying things back unprompted, which I generally don’t do.
I told him about the Hargrove job, and why it was three weeks behind.
He asked about drywall like the answers mattered.
I told him about my father and the tile and the three counties, which I had told approximately two people in my life, one of them Finn.
He told me he’d grown up everywhere and nowhere, an Army kid, then a man who’d simply never stopped moving once he had the choice.
He told me he owned almost nothing that didn’t fit in two bags, and that he’d shot weddings in six countries and food in twenty and had not slept in the same bed for more than three weeks in longer than he could remember.
“Doesn’t that get lonely?” I asked, before I could decide whether it was rude.
Something passed over his face. It was quick, but I caught it, the same flicker I’d seen the first evening when I’d said I had nowhere to be.
He gazed out at the water instead of looking at me as he spoke.
“You’d think I’d know,” he said. “Honestly, Istopped asking myself a long time ago. It’s easier not to.” Then he turned back, and his grin came up like a shutter snapping open on his camera. “Anyway, you want to see something amazing? Watch the rock, there, where the next wave comes in.”
I squinted at the rock.
The wave came in.
It did something with the light and the spray that was, I’ll grant him, genuinely beautiful. He watched me watch it instead of watching it himself, and when I looked back at him, he didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t been.
The space between us in that warm, clear water was about a foot and a half. I was aware of every inch of it the way you’re aware of a deadly fall when standing too close to an edge.
Neither of us closed it.
Not then.
But I felt the whole afternoon tip, the way I’d felt the light tip golden the evening before. Something changed temperature while we stood inside it. I understood with the slow certainty I brought to load-bearing walls that I was in trouble, the good kind, the kind I hadn’t been in for longer than Wes had slept in one bed.
We swam until our fingers went soft, then wrinkled.
We walked back when the light turned, because he had mangoes to redeem and a job to do. At the top of the path, he stopped and looked at me with the sun behind him.
“Same time tomorrow, Mark Apparently?”
“I’ve got nowhere to be,” I said.
“You keep saying that like it surprises you.”
“It does. Every time.”
He laughed. It was a good laugh, lower than Finn’s.
He headed off toward the resort with his camera on his shoulder, and I stood at the top of the path a moment longer than I needed to, watching him go, my reliable blue polo balled up forgotten in my fist.
I didn’t put it back on.
That, more than the cove or the water or anything Finn had lectured me about, was the day I understood something had come loose in me. A man who forgets to put his armor back on is a man who’s decided, at some deep level, that he doesn’t need it.
At least, I didn’t.
Not any longer.
Chapter 7
